Pros:

Cons:

Need for Speed Underground taps into that pop culture darling du jour: illegal street racing. It's a perfect subject for a game: the speed and attitude can be exaggerated, but no laws are broken and no innocent lives are endangered. Need for Speed Underground hits some bumps in the road, but for the most part it's an exciting racing game with an immersive career mode, beautiful presentation, and insane sense of speed.

Need for Speed Underground nicely bridges the gap between realism and turbo-charged arcade action, with the emphasis on the action. The physics take lots of liberties with reality, so serious sim fans may want to look elsewhere. Nevertheless, you'll still need some finesse to win; just mashing the accelerator won't cut it.

The real challenge in Underground isn't the subtleties of driving, but of being able to react with lightning-quick reflexes. When you're blasting through city streets at night, dodging construction zones and trucks, choosing which fork in the road to take, and trying to draft the race leader, you'll be wiping sweat from your brow. The sense of speed is thrilling, particularly in the drag racing mode, which makes you feel like you've just been launched down a busy city street on the back of a Saturn V rocket. This all could have backfired badly and come across as totally cartoony, but amazingly, it doesn't: it just feels like you've entered a world where extreme speed and danger are parts of everyday life.

In fact, a sense of danger is another thing Underground manages well. Not many racing games actually make you feel the adrenaline rush of driving on the edge. In Underground, particularly during your first few races, you sure get that sensation: it feels like one little slip-up will do you in. (In actuality, the game's cars can't be damaged and your alter-ego, of course, can't die, but you sure can ruin your lap times by barreling into a guard rail or a taxi.)

Bumps in the Road

It was all a blur: the sense of speed is awesome.

As addictive as Underground's racing is, you'll run into some frustrating problems. Showing its console roots, the PC interface is a bit clumsy: you have to use the "backspace" key instead of the usual "escape" to move back up a menu level, and we had a hard time configuring our controller. You only get three camera views -- two of them very similar -- and the game changes your view whenever you play a certain race mode. There's no replay system, something you expect from almost any racing game today. AI drivers tend to play bumper-cars too much. Worst of all, you spend all your time on the same handful of courses or minor variations on them in the same city; it's a real shame they're not more varied in both look and layout. You can only hope EA will release some free expansion packs like Epic and Digital Extremes have done for the Unreal Tournament series.

Also, while the relaxed physics and lack of damage modeling make the game accessible and fun, they nevertheless rob the driving of the subtlety and depth you'd find in a serious sim. Fortunately, Underground more than makes up for that by giving you plenty of depth in other areas. For one thing, you get a number of different race modes. You'll test your skills in multi-lap circuit races, sprint races that take you from point A to point B, drift races that test your powersliding skills, drag races that test your shifting accuracy, and more.